Ever wondered how Instagram gets it right every time with searches and tags? Or how it is that you can add multiple items to cart from different categories on Amazon? The simple answer is Redux, an open-source JavaScript library for application state management and centralization. More than 2,000 companies reportedly use Redux in their tech stacks.

So, what is Redux?

Redux is a lightweight predictable state container designed to help write JavaScript apps that behave consistently across client, server, and native environments and are easy to test. It was created by Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark around six years ago to get “better developer tools support, hot reloading and time travel debugging while [retaining] predictability”.

Although commonly used with libraries such as React (an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces and maintained by Meta) or Angular (JavaScript-based open-source framework for building single-page applications and maintained by the house of Google), it can be used with any other JavaScript framework or library to build and maintain apps.

How does Redux work?

Redux is a store to hold the state of the variables in your app. Each component can access any state that it needs from this store, like Amazon’s add-to-cart function. What Redux does is that it creates a process to interact with the store so components will not just update or read the store at random. Redux manages the “state” and allows access by all components in a structured way.

There are three parts to Redux:

1. Actions: Actions are events, and are the only way data can be sent from an application to the Redux store – through user interactions, API calls, etc.
2. Store: The store holds the application state and can be accessed, updated, and so on.
3. Reducers: Reducers are pure functions that take the current state of an application, perform an action, and return a new state.

Why use Redux?

App flexibility

Redux goes directly to the store by using the reducer function and this allows developers to change the state tree of the app every time a new action is dispatched, thus offering a flexible user interface architecture as well.

Uniformity

Problems often arise when a developer doesn’t understand the work done previously. They end up duplicating work by recreating components instead of just making necessary changes to existing code. But with Redux, there are fewer lines of code, and these are more readable and reusable, so you can easily add functions and make changes within the app.

Someone with knowledge of Redux can understand the structure of any Redux application. Redux also makes it easy to debug an application.

Faster communication

Redux is all about effective communication between components. Communication continues uninterrupted, even if internet connectivity is lost, as Redux uses state management for communication between components. It also offers faster performance than its competition. Redux is useful as the application begins to grow, and one needs to keep things predictable and traceable.

Redux, to use or not?

Although Redux is an efficient pattern that promotes pure functions, it may not be the right choice for simple applications that involve only a couple of changes to the user interface. There is also the learning curve to contend with, as developers may find themselves lost initially in the world of selectors, reducers, actions, and middlewares. Some developers do complain that there is a large amount of boilerplate code in every Redux application, which can be overwhelming.

But all in all, Redux allows you to manage your app’s state in a single place and keep changes in your app more predictable and traceable. If you do not have expertise with Redux, work with an expert like CloudNow to use all the latest tech, platforms, and languages in your next Java development project.